Career Test Resources

Whether you are interested in advancing your career or moving into a new one, professionally developed career tests can be a good way to ascertain the right move for you. These can be anything from short online quizzes to gauge the best jobs for you to professionally administered exams where your skills and psychology are detailed in a comprehensive report.

Although being tested tends to suggest being judged, many tests are designed only to identify, not evaluate your skills, traits, talents or motivation, and therefore have no intrinsic "pass/fail" dimension or purpose. Nonetheless, once identified by a test, aspects of your performance or potential gauged by the test may be used in competitive screening, if selection of candidates is based on the categories and measures a given test incorporates.

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A career test assesses an individual's personal and professional qualities, knowledge, skills, and/or aptitude. Such an analysis helps a person get a sense of clarity about what the best job might be for their personal motivations and characteristics.

Among the testing tools available is the questionnaire, which is usually a set of 40 to 100 questions. Generally the basic aim of the test is to identify, draw inferences from or evaluate, among other things, attitudes or motivation. Examples include personality and preference questionnaires.

Job tests are meant to direct a person's career aspirations towards the path he or she will excel in. The test results indicate traits and capabilities of an individual well-suited for a particular career. There are normally three types of tests. They are personality tests, interest tests, skill tests and multi-purpose tests. The first category result reveals an individual's soft skills and temperament, e.g., communication style when in different social environments. Interest-test results help to identify one's true passion for a definite industry. Personality tests probe deeply into the psyche to unearth traits that can significantly impact job suitability and performance. Finally, multi-purpose tests represent a combination of all the other three kinds. Test questions are commonly multiple-choice and timed, which can, intentionally or not, introduce an element of time-pressure that can serve as another applicant-screening layer.

These tests can range from highly structured examinations monitored and administered by a psychologist to very simple career quizzes online or in magazines, performed mostly for entertainment. Because the more sophisticated career tests often require a substantial personal cash outlay, post-testing explanation and interpretation, great care should be taken when selecting the professional to administer the test, as well as when selecting the test itself.

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